1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing information processing device, printing device, printing information processing method and printing system.
Hitherto, in the past, in order to carry out high-quality color printing, a printer that can carry out printing using six colors of light cyan (Lc) and light magenta (Lm), which have the property with the same hue as cyan and magenta and lower concentration, in addition to four colors of cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y) and black (K) is known for recording media such as toner and inks. For such a printing device, a manner is known for printing selecting, for example, a mode of using six colors of C, M, Y, K, Lc and Lm and a mode of using four colors of C, M, Y and K as modes with different number of kinds of recording media to be used.
For example, when printing character images, it is often that the image quality in using four color recording media of C, M, Y and K and that in using six color recording media of Lc and Lm added with former four media do not exhibit large difference from each other. Accordingly, in such printing, by carrying out four color printing, unnecessary use of the recording media of Lc and Lm can be restrained. When carrying out printing of gradient images such as photograph images, by carrying out six color printing, higher image quality printing can be attained.
As a structure for selecting such sets of four color recording media or six color recording media, it is known that a user sets the four color recording mode or the six color recording mode according to the image to be printed via an operation panel, etc. It is also known to discriminate the kind of image to be printed and to make selection on the basis of the discrimination when the plurality of modes with different using manners for the recording media are switched. As for the discriminating method, a method is known for discriminating the kind of image by checking the concentration distribution of image data and the concentration difference between adjoining dots.
However, the above-mentioned discriminating method requires some discriminating processes such as checking of the concentration distribution for the image data. Accordingly, when switching the set of recording media using the discriminating method, the processing load and processing time would be increased due to the discriminating process.
The quality of images to be printed might not be realized up to the level of using, for example, the above-mentioned six color recording media for the gradient images such as photograph images. This is because the expressing ability of the image data might not match six color printing. For example, when printing images picked up by a scanner are printed, the image data picked up by the CCD-technique (charge-coupled device technique) scanner has small noises and exhibits good color reproducibility, and as a result, it is suitable for six color printing as high quality printing. On the other hand, the image data picked up by the CIS-technique scanner has large noises and exhibits poor color reproducibility compared to that picked up by the CCD-technique scanner. Accordingly, even though the image data picked up by the CIS-technique (contact image sensor technique) is printed out in six colors, the image quality would be as low as that of four color printing. Some of the languages for describing the image data might be used for expressing sufficiently high quality images by six color printing, while others languages may not be so used. For example, as for PostScript of Adobe Inc., varieties of software are prepared for adjusting color reproducibility such as color calibration. Also, the profiles (data for describing the printer properties) for PostScript matching printers are prepared by manufactures of the printers. Furthermore, the variety of software for creating profiles is prepared, and thus the color reproducibility is in good environment compared to other languages. For example, in carrying out printing in six colors by a printer, if the profile for PostScript is prepared while that for other languages is not prepared, the image data described in a language other than PostScript would not be suitable to high quality six color printing.
Such image input equipment or data description language would often be selected according to the quality of images to be printed. In particular, in the printing environment where various kinds of equipment are connected via a network, it would be easy to select and use the image input equipment or data description language according to the quality of images to be printed.